Mitt Romney double-talk was out in full force this weekend
Mitt Romney during
Saturday's debate, saying that even though he opposes gay marriage, he doesn't want anybody to think that he's suggesting gay couples can't raise children well...
But -- but to say that -- that marriage is something other than the relationship between a man -- a man and a woman, I think, is a mistake. And the reason for that is not that we want to discriminate against people or to suggest that -- that gay couples are not just as loving and can’t also raise children well.
...and Mitt Romney in the next sentence, saying that the reason he opposes gay marriage is that he doesn't want children to be raised by gay couples:
But it’s instead a recognition that, for society as a whole, that the nation presumably will -- would be better off if -- if children are raised in a setting where there’s a male and a female. And there are many cases where there’s not possible: divorce, death, single parents, gay parents, and so forth.
But -- but for a society to say we want to encourage, through the benefits that we associate with marriage, people to form partnerships between men and women and then raise children, which we think will -- that will be the ideal setting for them to be raised.
Mitt Romney's double-talk here is bad enough—as his continued opposition to marriage equality—but Romney's position effectively punishes children who are raised by single or gay parents. Even if he were right that every single child in every single instance would be best off being raised by a man and a woman, how does that justify giving additional benefits to the families of those children? Why should children living in other sorts of family arrangements be denied those same benefits?
Of course, if Romney really believed his argument, he'd say you can't get married unless (a) you're marrying someone of the opposite sex and (b) you are going to have children. Instead, he's just trying to defend a position he took for political reasons. But his position is indefensible.